I’ve been thinking about the Catholic Church quite a lot recently. There was FFRF’s full-page NYT ad last month, vjack’s post two weeks ago about people’s reasons for leaving Catholicism, and Adam Lee’s post last week about the papacy’s apparent embrace of its slow slide into irrelevance. On top of all that reading, though, there’s […]

It’s time for another discussion of morality. Just a quick reminder, keep it secular in the comments. The idea that it’s immoral to be attracted to someone of the same gender (or at least, to act on that attraction) is pretty common around the world. Yet it seems to me that romantic and/or sexual relationships […]

Good grief, you guys! How did you let me go so long without ending this series?! It’s been a while, so I think a quick recap is in order. Chapter 1: Driscoll uses his trademark “frank words” to point out the porniest parts of the Bible. (How does this help his case? I’m not sure.) […]

A recent Dear Prudence advice column at Slate takes its title from the first question, written by a Sunday school teacher who feels no sympathy for victims of natural disasters — an interesting topic for atheist discussion in its own right. However, right now I’d rather talk about this letter which came a bit later. […]

The end-of-semester crunch came at me out of nowhere this time. I’ve been busy, but I’ll be catching up this weekend and back next week with lots of good stuff. In the meantime, here are your weekly miscellaneous links. Abstinence: you’re doing it wrong. (Heh. “Doing it.”) Steve Wells has a long list of reasons […]

New to the series? Start at the Introduction, or see the Mark Driscoll tag. Oh, my goodness. I can’t believe I forgot about the Porn Again Christian series again! I really want to talk about chapter 8 (it’s a real doozy) and there’s only one more to get through before that! So here’s chapter 7, […]

Previous posts: Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4. Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of silly stuff in the fifth chapter of Porn Again Christian, entitled “Masturbation.” The first half or so is Mark Driscoll’s general pontification on the subject, with musings on practical and moral considerations. I could write at great length on […]

Previous posts in this series: Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3. Hey, it’s been a while, right? Maybe you thought I forgot about our old buddy Pastor Mark and his pamphlet, Porn Again Christian. (Maybe you were relieved…?) But I haven’t forgotten. I hate starting things and leaving them unfinished, and we’ve got 5 […]

Previous posts in this series: Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 2. Chapter 3 of Pastor Mark Driscoll’s anti-pornography pamphlet, Porn Again Christian, purports to give “A Theology of Pornographic Lust.” I’m going to treat this chapter a bit more holistically than the others in this book, rather than going nearly paragraph-by-paragraph essentially fisking, because I think […]

Previous posts in this series: Introduction, Chapter 1. The second chapter of Mark Driscoll’s pamphlet Porn Again Christian is called “The Fear of the Lord.” He’s going to quote a bunch of scripture in an attempt to demonstrate how dire the situation really is if you are looking at pornography and/or masturbating. Simply, until you […]